A Different Country?!

They came in to the little town
A semi-naked band subdued and silent.
All that remained of their tribe.
They came here to the place of their old bora ground
Where now the many white men hurry about like ants.
Notice of estate agent reads: “Rubbish May Be Tipped Here”.
Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring.
They sit and are confused, they cannot say their thoughts:
“We are strangers here now,
but the white tribe are the strangers.
We belong here, we are of the old ways.
We are the corroborree and the bora ground.
We are the old sacred ceremonies, the laws of the elders.
We are the wonder tales of Dreamtime, the tribal legends told.
We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games,
the wandering camp fire.
We are the lightning-bolt over Gaphembah Hill
Quick and terrible,
And the Thunderer after him, that loud fellow.
We are the quiet daybreak paling the dark lagoon.
We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back
as the camp fires burn low.
We are the nature and the past, all the old ways
Gone now and scattered.
The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone
from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going.”
(“We are going (For Grannie Coolwell)” by Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal)

The Matthean community, the community to which the Gospel of Matthew speaks and out of which the Gospel of Matthew arises, was a community on the edge of their society. They were being pushed out by the religious leaders, by their social groups, but most of all they were being pushed out by their families.

Kinship was everything in Mediterranean societies at the beginning of the first millenium. It wasn’t what you knew or who you knew, it was whose family you belonged to that counted. If you didn’t have a family support structure you were out on your own. There was no social security, no medicare, no superannuation, no welfare state. If you wanted to defy your family, turn your back on your tradition, or simply not do the right thing, you could find yourself in a pretty tough position without family support.

But it was probably never the intention of the Matthean community to put themselves in that position. They were so sure that they were part of the continuing tradition of the keeping and carrying of God’s law. They were so sure that they were part of the continuing movement towards the promised realm of God. That’s why it’s nearly four chapters or 82 verses into the Gospel of Matthew before we actually hear about the proclaimed message of Jesus. The first 81 verses have been establishing who Jesus is, how much he fits the tradition, and how well he fits into the spirit of the law of God—81 verses establishing Jesus’ credentials.

Now it’s always encumbent on a speaker to establish a rapport with their hearers before the meat of their speech is delivered, but 81 verses seems a little excessive even in Gospel terms. Mark has a very cursory introduction of 14 verses before we get to the all important message; John’s not so much interested in words as signs so in the very first chapter we get a run down on the signs which point to Jesus’ significance. Only Luke takes as much time on the introduction as Matthew, and you have to wonder whether it’s an historian’s love of story that’s playing a bit of a role there, or perhaps like Matthew, Luke is also speaking to an audience that needs to be wooed first. Yes, Matthew has very clearly and carefully set up the character of Jesus before his first real proclamation is made: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

And significantly, immediately following this one sentence account of Jesus’ message, we are greeted by stories that assure the hearer that Jesus was not alone. He was not a lone messenger of this proclamation from God. He was part of a larger community, part of a greater family, surrounded by appropriate social support structures, albeit not necessarily by blood relatives. He was not alone. The collator of the stories of Matthew’s Gospel is very careful to show that the new community of Christ, like the Matthean community as part of that wider community, was a good family social support structure. They had what it took to belong to each other and, therefore, to their world.

Nevertheless, the Matthean community was fast becoming labelled by their surrounding culture as “deviant”. And in every culture, in every time and place, people who are labelled as deviant are always the target for attack. No wonder they are so concerned with arguing the case for Jesus and the community of Christ being in line with the truth of the tradition. This issue was a life and death matter in terms of identity, in terms of acceptance in their society, in terms of social and economic support, and perhaps even in terms of specifically targeted attacks against their presence in their region.

We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhoods. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot relive the 20, 30, 40 years that we spent without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not erase the attacks inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to eliminate us as Aboriginals. (Link-Up NSW).

That’s part of the submission to the National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by Link-Up NSW, an organisation which assists separated and displaced people in finding their families again.

Separation from community is not a matter to be taken lightly, even though many of us treat it as such in our increasingly mobile society. More and more people move house, job and community through choice and compulsion with very little thought for the actual disruption which that that creates in people’s lives. Even when we move from one similar community to another with all our family ties intact, the move can cause considerable stress and strain on individuals. Moving communities is right up on the stress scale just below the death of a spouse, because moving involves the loss of key support structures and entails the need to re-build them. People forcibly removed physically, politically, economically or socially and those who move between communities which are quite different, and may even speak different languages are confronted by yet greater loss of support.

So when we hear the story of the disciples who left their boats to follow Jesus, we are not hearing about an individual choice, we are hearing about a shift in communities and social support structures. Take their boats, that was never an option, they belonged to the family. For whatever reasons people left their familial situations to become part of the emerging Christian community, they were taking an enormous social step. And to leave a father, that was tantamount to blasphemy itself. You have to wonder what really was going on in that society at that time, and in Matthew’s Gospel we can only read between the lines.

Those who came to form part of the emerging Christian community would more than likely not have come alone. While they may have left more important or powerful connections, they would have brought with them those family members that had more connection with the leavers than the stayers. That’s part of the significance of the stories of the baptism of whole households in Acts. Households, extended families, which included servants as well in richer establishments, stuck together. The group was more important than the individual. There was no sense that someone should do what’s right for them. It was always about family obligations and family ties.

So what happens when those family ties are severed or damaged? You have to re-build. You have to create a new support structure for yourself and those for whom you have responsibility. The early Christian communities were not only building a new community for themselves, they were re-building their lives, re-making social networks, re-structuring family supports. This time those supports were not necessarily based on blood relationships. This time those supports were connected to the desire to follow what they believed was the authentic law of God, revealed in Jesus.

What made them leave their original support base? Perhaps they were already outcasts for a variety of reasons. Certainly, it is in Matthew that we hear about the acceptance of the kinds of people that might have faced ostracism in their society simply because they were who they were: Gentiles, women, the ill and diseased. Perhaps in their ostracism, they discovered the acceptance of Jesus, and perhaps when they heard the message of Jesus “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near”, they heard the promise of a new beginning and a new community.

When each person is reunited with their family, it’s the beginning of a slow process of getting to know their family and learning about their community. Support and counselling of the many underlying issues is normally required as an ongoing process for many years. (Link-Up Qld)

That’s part of the submission from Link-Up in Qld to the National Inquiry on the stolen generations.

Somehow, the early Christian communities were able to re-build themselves, to re-create the social support they needed to survive. For them, the message of repentance was a message of acceptance. It proclaimed the need to re-evaluate their lives, to see them in connection with a new community rather than the support structures which they had been denied.

The Greek word for “repentance” literally means a change of mind. Centuries of overlay has made us hear that word only in terms of personal guilt, but perhaps in its early context it meant something more like, “Don’t despair, change your attitude, change your understanding, the community of God is always with you. You are always part of it. It’s okay to leave your boats behind because there is safety with the people of God.” And perhaps it was also a call to the wider society to re-evaluate their tendency to ostracise those who did not fit certain criteria, to see the community of humanity as a community which could encompass all, and to understand the eternal law of God as a call to that kind of inclusive community.

Our story is in the land...
It is written in those sacred places.
My children will look after those places,
that’s the law.
Dreaming place...
you can’t change it,
no matter who you are.
No matter you rich man,
no matter you king.
You can’t change it.
My children go to hang onto this story.
This important story.
I hang onto this story all my life.
My father tell me this story.
My children can’t lose it.
When that law started?
I don’t know how many thousand years.
European say 40,000 years,
but I reckon myself probably was more because it is sacred.
(“Australia’s Kakaduman” by Bill Neidjie)

The community of Matthew is carving out a new country for itself, spinning a new story of identity—a country born out of the margins; a country steeped in the law and the tradition; a country that offered new hope, a new society, a new family; a country that the Matthean community understood to belong to God: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This new country is God’s sacred realm and Jesus is at its heart.

Call to Worship for Year A Ordinary Sunday 3

The Lord is our light and our salvation:
whom then shall we fear?
God is the stronghold of our life:
of whom then shall we be afraid?
God gives us shelter:
a place to honour God and seek God’s way.
Just one thing we ask:
to live in God’s house forever.
In God’s house, we celebrate God’s beauty:
safe to ask questions and sing God’s praise!
Adapted from Psalm 27: 1,4-6 NRSV.

To Fulfill All Righteousness

“To fulfil all righteousness.” My mother used to say that when there seemed to be no other plausible reason for having to do something. “To fulfil all righteousness.” It’s the letter of the law not the spirit. We have to do it because there is some rule or other that says we have to do it, even if we don’t know why we have to do it. “To fulfil all righteousness.” But I don’t think that’s what we’re meant to hear when we hear those words in the story of the baptism of Jesus. I don’t think that that is what “to fulfil all righteousness” quite means here.

Because “righteousness” is really just another word for justice in the Gospel stories. The righteousness of God is about God’s justness. So the story of Jesus’ baptism is not about Jesus undertaking something that he had to do for no apparent reason. And the fact that the story is included in 3 gospels and alluded to in the fourth means that the early Christian communities and the gospel editors didn’t think that it was that kind of story either: a story about nothing, if you like.

No, the story is included in the early church’s memories of Jesus because it had significance for the early church. The fact that Jesus was baptised had significance for them: so much significance that baptism becomes a very important ritual in the early Christian community—the rite of initiation into the community itself.

But baptism was around long before Christianity. Water is such an important symbol for human beings. It lends itself so well to symbolic gestures. It is an ambiguous sign. Water has the power for life and the power for death. The power to cleanse and the power to sweep entirely away. Long before Christianity, baptism, the act of going under and coming up from the waters was used as a sign for conversion or new directions in religious faith. The word “baptism” comes from a Greek word meaning “to dip” or “to plunge”. The new convert is dipped or plunged into water to signify a cleansing, renewing, rebirthing into a new faith direction.

That’s why one of the suggestions for the reason why the story of Jesus’ baptism has been so significant has been to argue that Jesus’ baptism is the point at which he receives his call to ministry. This story is said to recall the moment when Jesus’ destiny was fully revealed. It’s a good suggestion, but not my personal choice.

The story itself, particularly in Matthew, doesn’t seem to see things that way. It’s a pretty definite Jesus that says “it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness”. And according to the preceding piece about John the Baptist, Jesus stands out from the crowd long before the act of baptism. No, the story of Jesus’ baptism is the Gospel of Matthew is not presented as the moment of the truth, the moment of his call.

No, for me, it’s the water to which I return in the story of Jesus’ baptism, and in Matthew’s Gospel, the Jewish-Christian Gospel, I think that it’s the water that’s quite significant: the going down and the coming up.

You have to remember that, at the time that the gospels are being put together, the early Christian communities are still in the process of becoming separated from their Jewish beginnings. The Jewish faith story still runs through their attempts to understand who Jesus was and why he was significant. And the defining story for the people of the Jewish faith is the story of the Exodus: the rescue of the oppressed people of Israel from the tyrannical Egyptian pharoah—the story of the Prince of Egypt as DreamWorks would like to tell us.

This story of going down and coming up, of descent and ascent, has already appeared as an echo in the Gospel of Matthew in the tale of the escape of Jesus’ family to Egypt after the warning from the wise visitors. And we are still meant to hear its echoes in the story of Jesus’ baptism. Because this story is yet another story about establishing Jesus credentials.

In chapter 1 we hear about his genealogy in the line of Abraham and David. We hear of his birth in fulfilment of the prophets. In chapter 2 we hear of his recognition by nations beyond Israel, and his appearance in fulfilment of the wisdom from the East. We also hear of the journey to and from Egypt, just like the ancestors of the Jewish people. And in the baptismal story we are meant to keep hearing these echoes of faith and tradition, placing Jesus in the line of the faithful and prophetic people of God.

To be a person of the Jewish faith means being able to recount the ancestral story as your story:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor who went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Deut 26:5b-9)

This is the tradition to which Jesus is linked because this is a tradition of depth. In this tradition, there is a sense in which faith in God is discovered in the trials of life, in the moments of despair when even God seems far away—in the goings down before the comings out which only God can do. “To fulfil all righteousness.” To bring about all justice.

We don’t really know anything much about the life of Jesus. We don’t really know what his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood was like. We don’t know what prompted his ministry. We have only the records of the gospel writers, memories and re-tellings of a very short period in Jesus’ life. But they all include or allude to the baptism of Jesus, and for Matthew in particular, the image is attached to the powerful stories of the Jewish faith.

Jesus is the one who went down to Egypt and who came up again not to be saved, but to save. Jesus is the one who went down in the waters, not to be saved but to save. Jesus is the one who endured the pain of degradation and humiliation to continue his message of justice and peace. Jesus is the archetypal child of God—the one who discovers relationship in God in the depths of life, and who emerges from those depths to point others towards God’s love, to bring others into the realm of God’s love.

This is God’s righteousness. This is God’s justice. Jesus participates in the tradition, identifies with the tradition of the righteousness and justice of God “to fulfil all righteousness”, to fulfil all justice, to expand the community of the people of God.

And now we are the baptised people of God. Jesus’ story is our story. For we have participated symbolically and in reality as human beings in the goings down and the comings up of the human story. Our God is the God we have discovered in the depths, who is the one who brings us up out of the water into the light. Our God is the God who demands the fulfilment of all righteousness, not because there is no apparent reason for doing it, but because it is the will and the justice of God.

And as God’s baptised people we are called to bring others into the community of God: to help others stand in the tradition where God never leaves the people even in their deepest despair; to proclaim that the work of God happens in the goings down and comings up of a people of faith as they seek to fulfil all righteousness; to bring about God’s community of justice and peace; to allow ourselves to be baptised in the tradition, the continuing life of the people of God, and the continuing life of humanity as it cries out for justice and peace; to be prepared for our own goings down and comings up in our own journeys of life and faith towards the justice of God.

Playing With Light

So it’s the 9th day of the Christmas season, the second Sunday of that season and the day we may also commemorate as Epiphany, the celebration of the revealing of Christ, the “unfolding vision of wholeness that God has made manifest for all people in Jesus the Christ” (Seasons of the Spirit). Epiphany means “revelation” or “manifestation” or “display”. The day of Epiphany, 6 January, is the day after the Christmas season. It marks the unleashing of the impact of the incarnation upon the world.

At Epiphany, we hear and tell the story of the wise visitors to the infant Jesus, not in a manger, but in a house. And as we do, we disentangle a piece of Matthew’s story about Jesus from the trappings of the stable and the shepherds at the birth of Jesus.

We hear the story of the visit of the Magi, the wise ones, to the infant Jesus, not as part of the prettiness and wonder of the Christmas story, but as part of the ongoing storying in which the early Christian communities were involved in about the life of Jesus. This story is not a lovely story about some strange visitors. It is a strange story about knife-edge politics—a story about the challenging and confronting of traditions, about the way in which the emerging Christian story was being read back into the life of the infant Jesus.

We hear about the interplay of the light and the depth of the Jesus experience on the unfolding understanding of the early Christian community, and the way that that interplay was being enfolded into their own story.

Have you ever sat somewhere and watched the play of light on water? Perhaps you were at the ocean, or by a waterfall, or near a river. Maybe the sun was high and the glare was intense, so that you almost had to turn away. Perhaps the light was diffused by some rainforest trees so that the light jumped like the water constantly changing pattern and form. Perhaps there were clouds in the sky that cast intricate shadows of varying shades. Light illuminates and light obfuscates; light makes it impossible to see. We don’t see the light. We see that which the light shines upon.

Water is a symbol of the Christian community—the baptised ones; those immersed in the depths of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And light is a sign of the revelation of God in Christ. And in this interplay of the light of Christ on the depths of the Christian community, the story of the sages who recognise what is right before the eyes of Israel, the light to the nations, emerges.

It is through our stories that we make sense of our world. It is by our stories that we describe who we are. And it is in the re-telling of those stories, the re-storying of our traditions, our histories, our identities that we learn to cope with our ever-changing world and ourselves within it.

The communities out of which the Gospel of Matthew arose were discovering who they were—as a reformist Jewish movement, as Jewish Christians, and then as Christians distinct from their Jewish counterparts. They valued the depths of Judaisim, the insights of their faith, the Jewish faith, and they understood that that faith had sustained the people for a long, long time. Within their tradition, there were various elements that were particularly important: respect for the law of God; interest in the idea of God’s wisdom and how that wisdom interacted with the wisdom of other peoples around the Jewish faith community; the challenging story of the people’s descent into Egypt, their liberation by God and the journey to the promised land. But they were also experiencing something new—something that stemmed from their faith, and extended it.

Now on top of the deep traditions of the Jewish faith, the people of the communities which Matthew addresses have the depth of the Jesus experience. The light is playing on their water and producing new understandings of who God is and who they are before God. The depth of the traditions which they embody are being illuminated anew to produce different patterns and different ways of seeing; and their storytelling reflects those new experiences and understandings. So they tell a new old story about a visit of some wise folk from the East who recognise the light when they see it.

In the telling of this tale, they confront the depths of their traditions with the light of the new, and in that process some of the old has to go, some of the new has to be re-interpreted and some of the old definitely has to stay. Because you cannot watch light play on water if there is no water, and none of us begin our stories from nothing. We all build from what we have storied before.

So a story is told which involves confronting a dubious part of the tradition. A bad king, Herod, takes the role of that which must be defied. The story includes a newer part of the tradition: an emphasis on wisdom in the persons of the visitors from the East. The wisdom tradition was barely centuries old at the time of Jesus. And the new light—the infant Jesus—more than a baby, not still in the manger, but residing with parents to protect and care for him—takes centre stage.

The old story is quoted to back up the plot. Bethlehem is cited as the place most likely to sporn a new ruler to defy the might of kings like Herod, no longer loyal to the tradition, but operated like puppets behind the scenes by Roman rulers. Last week you heard more of that story. The fear of Herod, the attempt to kill the infant, the journey to Egypt and out again: an upside down version of the earlier tale of the Exodus. This week we heard that story’s beginning: the alerting of Herod to a possible rival by the Magi from the East.

And when the old traditions have been subsumed into the new, the wise visitors and Herod the king depart the story, and the light falls fully on the new light and the teaching of Jesus, but that’s where our story continues next week.

The story is alarming, more like a crime novel, or a movie thriller than a cute fairy story for children. Because in this story there is confrontation and intrigue, violence and elusive escape. And it’s not just in the plot. It’s in the very story itself. For as the story unfolds, we are drawn into a re-storying of tradition; a playing of the light on the water that can at first dazzle, sometimes transfix and maybe even confuse. When we confront a new story, when we are confronted by a light that startles and overwhelms us, it is our traditions that we fall back upon, the things with which we are familiar. And it is from these old stories that we draw the stuff of the explanation for the new. In a way, that is a kind of violence too, because as we make the new story, we destroy the old. And while we always hope that our continuing story will help us to understand our living better and better we can never be sure. We trust in the play of water on light. Like the infant Jesus, we journey to Egypt in vulnerability uncertain whether the traditioning process will help us to re-make our stories again.

Re-making our stories is something we do every day of our lives, but it is particularly something that we do in times of immense change and challenge. The ability to re-make our stories is part of being resilient, part of being able to cope with life’s highs and lows.

The emerging Christian communities whose stories only Matthew records find comfort and resilience in the story of infant Jesus, visited by the wise, foretold by the prophets, bringer of light and keeper of the depths of old traditions. And in that delicate balance, they re-make their story and the story of the world.

So where does that leave this Christian community today. We continue that re-storing process. The light of Christ continues to play in our lives and to produce new patterns and experiences. And we are called to proclaim them.